Vasko Popa

by Vasko Popa, Charles Simic (Introduction), Charles Simic (Translator), Charles Simic (Selected by)

Overview

An original collection of work by the great Serbian poet of the twentieth century.

Vasko Popa is widely recognized as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, a riddling fabulist, whose work, taking its bearings from the songs and folklore of his native his Serbia and from surrealism, has a dark gnomic fatalistic humor and pathos that are like nothing else. Charles Simic, a master of contemporary American poetry, has been translating Popa’s work for more than a quarter century. This revised and greatly expanded edition of Simic’s Popa is a revelation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681373379
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	06/25/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	578 KB

About the Author

Vasko Popa (1922-1991) was born in the Banat region of Northern Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia. During World War II, he joined the Communist underground and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp at Bečkerek. After the war, he graduated from Belgrade University and published his first collection, Kora (Bark) in 1953, the first of his eight books. He came to be known as the most famous Yugoslav poet of the 20th century, as well as the most translated.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He has published some twenty collections of poetry, six books of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His most recent collection is Scribbled in the Dark: Poems (2017).

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS
 
Introduction

Poems: 
I.  White Pebble
II. Bone to Bone
III. Games
IV. Give me Back My Rags
V.  The Yawn of Yawns
VI.  Heaven’s Ring
VII. St. Sava’s Spring
VIII. Homage to the Lame Wolf
IX. Wolf’s Earth
X. The Little Box
XI. From RAW FLESH

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/24/2019

Dark and fabulist, tender and unsparing, and sparkling with folklore and fractured modernity, Popa’s poems offer allegories at once global and deeply Slavic. “You pace back and forth/ Along your private infinity,” he writes, departing from the socialist realism that surrounded him. Simic, who has been translating Popa (1922–1991) for almost three decades, calls the poet’s work “a mix of native and foreign influences and the product of own ingenuity.” This selection organizes work from across Popa’s lifetime into 11 sections, outlining an oeuvre at home among unreal objects, fantastic animals, bleak poverty, disturbing games, trembling mortality, and the insidious specter of larger, darker motivations driving nearly everything. “What’s up now,” he asks in “In the Moonlight:”—“It’s as if flesh snow like flesh/ Is beginning to stick to me.” He demurs: “I don’t know either/ It’s as everything is starting again/ With an even more terrifying beginning// You know what/ Can you bark.” While some of the later poems lack the inventiveness of his middle and early work, this offering nevertheless reveals an icon of the 20th century, torquing language and time back toward something fearful and animalistic. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Popa’s imaginative journey resembles a Universe passing through a Universe. It has been one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.” —Ted Hughes


“The symbolist poetry of Mr. Popa, a modernist, was widely hailed as the finest in the Serbian language and an artful mix of folk poetry and surrealism. His language was succinct, often aphoristic and elliptical, and it focused on the specific over the abstract.” —The New York Times


"No other Serbian poet sounds like Popa. He was both the product of his time and place and the inventor of his own world." —London Review of Books


"A poet of genuine vision." —Kirkus

From the Publisher